The Origin Millennium (starts at $1,977; $7,399 as tested) is a high-end gaming desktop with a high-powered Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor and three Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 graphics cards in a 3-way SLI configuration. This means that the system is ready for 4K gaming, and barely breaks a sweat running our barrage of multimedia and gaming benchmark tests. It trounces the competition on most of our benchmark tests, and is quite competitive on the few in which it didn't place first. It's no surprise that the Millennium is our new Editors' Choice high-end gaming desktop PC.

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Design and Features The Millennium uses Origin PC's customizable chassis, which is a midtower model that can be expanded in the future, using a custom extension, to a full tower with extra space for GPU coolers or extra hard drives. The midtower chassis of our review unit sports a window on the side panel to see into the neatly constructed interior and to show off the trio of Nvidia GTX 980 graphics cards. It measures about 21.5 by 9.75 by 25 inches (HWD), so you'll need a lot of desktop space or stow it under your worktable. The top of the chassis is indented, so it can hold a large smartphone for charging. There are customizable colored LEDs installed around the tower, in case you want to intimidate opponents or just find your way to the system in a dark room, and they're controlled with a bundled IR remote control. This is more convenient than using a software package, which has a tiny chance of conflicting with other programs on your hard drive.

For systems this big, you either leave lots of room, or in the Millennium's case, pack it to the gills. The Intel Core i7-5960X processor sits in a full-size Asus X99 series ATX motherboard, similar to the setup we saw on the Maingear Epic Force Super Stock X99. All of the motherboard's PCIe slots are filled or are blocked by the graphics cards. However, there is still some internal expansion, including four DIMM slots for extra memory to supplement the installed 16GB.

Access to the interior is easy for the most part. Both side doors swing open without the need for tools, and you can lock the latches to prevent unauthorized access. It took a bit to get used to swinging the doors open and getting them closed again. It may be more secure, but the doors are a little more finicky to line up and secure than the simple sliding panels we've seen on most high-end desktops, like the Digital Storm Coridium, another top pick in the category.

The lower-front portion of the chassis holds five hot-swappable 3.5-inch drive bays, so you can add more storage if the included 1TB solid-state drive (SSD) drive and 4TB hard drive aren't enough. A Blu-ray burner is flanked top and bottom by three additional optical drive bays, and a swinging door on the front panel protects the optical drives and hard drive bays when you're not accessing them. Most high-end flagship gaming models, like the Falcon Northwest Mach V (GTX 980), also have a swinging door on the front to cover the optical drives, though the Millennium one-ups the Falcon Northwest Mach V by giving you external access to the empty hard drive bays.

Liquid cooling runs from the CPU up to a top-mounted radiator. This means that the case fan on the back doesn't have to work too hard. We saw the back fan actually stop and go to sleep mode between benchmark runs, showing how efficient the cooling is in the chassis. You can manually control the fans to make the system quieter. A 1,300-watt power supply unit (PSU) sits in the bottom of the chassis, ready for future upgrades.

Connectors are plentiful. There are four USB 3.0 ports, a microphone jack, and a headphone jack in the recess at the top of the system, as well as the fan control, the Power button, and the Reset button are also protected from inadvertent presses in the same indent. The back of the chassis has six audio jacks, nine DisplayPorts, three DVI ports, two Ethernet ports, three HDMI ports, two USB 2.0 ports (one clearly marked for BIOS recovery use), 14 USB 3.0 ports, and a Toslink port all help you connect gaming peripherals. The three graphics cards each have three DisplayPorts, a DVI port, and an HDMI port. You should have no problem connecting multiple monitors to the Millennium. The desktop has an excellent 3-year warranty and lifetime labor for future service and upgrades.

Performance The Millennium has an octo-core Intel Core i7-5960X processor, overclocked from the standard 3GHz up to 4.5GHz. That's good enough for the desktop to earn a top score of 3,764 points on the PCMark 8 Work Conventional test and 30 seconds on the Handbrake test. It also was just behind the class-leading Falcon Northwest Mach V (GTX 980) on the Adobe Photoshop CS6 test at 2:26, and it scored 1,615 points on the CineBench R15 test. That means you can do multimedia tasks, like photo and video editing, or even create a 3D cartoon short from scratch, with ease (assuming, of course, you know how to do that).

The game grid is the where Millennium truly shines, especially when you consider that some of its competition are significantly more expensive. While the Maingear Epic Force is top dog on the 3DMark Cloud Gate (54,695) and 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme (16,514) tests, but the Millennium (54,395 on Cloud Gate; 13,994 on Fire Strike Extreme) holds it own. The Digital Storm Coridium (37,833, Cloud Gate; 8,926, Fire Strike Extreme) and Falcon Northwest Mach V (42,163, Cloud Gate; 10,072 Fire Strike Extreme) are still in the mix as well.

The Millennium also returned butter-smooth frame rates on the Heaven test, scoring 267 frames per second (fps) at Medium quality and 183fps at Ultra quality, as well as on the Valley test (144fps at Medium; 142fps at Ultra). This is blows away the AMD Radeon R9 295X2-equipped Maingear Epic Force, particularly at the Ultra-quality levels. The Falcon Northwest Mach V and Digital Storm Coridium are a bit further back, but are still competitive. In anecdotal testing, we pushed the Millennium from 1,920-by-1,080 up to 2,560-by-1,600 resolution (the native resolution of a 30-inch panel) and bumped the anti-aliasing from 4X to 8X. It still produced rock-steady frame rates of 91fps on Heaven and 96fps on Valley. This is better than the Falcon Northwest Mach V's lower, though still-smooth, frame rates on Heaven (62fps) and Valley (67fps). Thus, while the Millennium didn't win every single 3D test, it still won the ones that count. You should be ready to tackle 3K, 4K, and maybe even 5K gaming with this system.

The high-end gaming desktop category is a funny thing. Trappings like automotive paint jobs and liquid cooling everything can make a system seem more attractive, but it really comes down to performance numbers in the end. The Origin Millennium (as configured here) will let you turn up all the eye candy, even if you're gaming on a high-resolution display. It's less expensive than the Falcon Northwest Mach V (GTX 980) and Maingear Epic Force Super Stock X99, has much better performance numbers than the competition on most of the tests, and is a little easier to hook up. We therefore have no problem crowning the Origin Millennium as our Editors' Choice high-end gaming desktop.

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About the Author

Joel Santo Domingo joined PC Magazine in 2000, after 7 years of IT work for companies large and small. His background includes managing mobile, desktop and network infrastructure on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Joel is proof that you can escape the retail grind: he wore a yellow polo shirt early in his tech career. Along the way Joel e... See Full Bio

Origin Millennium

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